Before N’Golo Kanté started squeezing opponents in the spring on his way to the Chelsea Champions League, the non-negotiable name in midfield blue was Mateo Kovacic. While the Frenchman waited on the bench, Thomas Tuchel declared his love for the Croatian: “You can wake him up at three in the morning and he will be ready for training at 3.15,” proclaimed the German coach a month after arriving at Stamford Bridge. So, the core of the team was Kovacic and the rest. That was until the Balkan was injured and Kanté, in alliance with Jorginho, became the master of everything and started the TBM.
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Three seasons have passed since Kovacic left Madrid. At the age of 27, this footballer with physical deployment and long drives has grown older and his presence has multiplied in London and with the national team. “I have progressed, I have had more continuity and confidence. It is important for any player that he is not changed soon ”, he warned last Friday, indirectly pointing to what happened to him at the Bernabéu.
At Chelsea he has been relevant with all the coaches (Sarri, Lampard and Tuchel) and with Croatia he has risen to the category of fixed. If in the 2018 World Cup he was a junior, only starting in the third match of the league, with little at stake, and he did not have any minute in the semifinals or the final, in this Eurocup he has always accompanied Modric from the beginning in the center and has only been relieved in the last few moments.
Until his injury he was the undisputed of Tuchel in London, ahead of Kanté
During the first phase, his statistics have also escorted those of the madridista. It has been the second of the team that has touched the most balls (228), only behind the merengue (269), the two have been the ones that have given the most passes (226-195) and with a better percentage (88.94% – 88.72%), and the media that have recovered a greater number of balls (16).
Fearful of Busquets
After that summer of 2018, things began to change for this practicing and self-confessed Catholic who met his wife when he was an altar boy in a parish: then he left the Bernabéu, sought and found himself a more leading actor in London, and in the The national team was installed regularly in the eleven, also benefited by the resignation of Rakitic. “I have not played too much and that has affected my status in Croatia,” he lamented a few months before that move, during a World Championship in Russia that he had to enjoy in the shade.
After a World Cup in the shadows and Rakitic’s goodbye, he is now a regular in the eleven
In those days, he was already brooding his departure from Madrid, frustrated for being the fifth half (after Casemiro, Kroos, Modric and Isco) and hurt for not having played even a second of the 2018 Champions League final. “I thought I deserved it an opportunity. That was the main reason for my dissatisfaction ”, he later confessed, denying any kind of resentment.
Now, with command in place, this player born in Linz (Austria), where his Bosnian-Croat parents had fled the war in the Balkans, Spain awaits him in the eighth of the Eurocup and has no doubts that one of the keys will be to stop one of their peers on the other side. “Busquets is the one who starts all the plays, we will have to stop him, he cannot move without being pressured,” he commented two days ago about the Red midfielder. In that same plot, in addition to Modric, he will probably be accompanied by Brozovic, who precisely arrived at Inter a few months after Kovacic’s departure to Madrid in 2015, for 38 million after a request from Rafa Benítez (later he was sold to Chelsea for 45 ).
The Nerazzurri, 28, and Modric, 35, fixed in the world runner-up in Russia, have remained in the Croatian core ever since. Now the shortlist is completed by Kovacic, who with 70 caps and just three goals (none in the final phase of a major tournament), faces his most decisive day with the national team.
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